


Five Nightmares

by basaltgrrl



Category: Life on Mars (UK)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-08
Updated: 2010-10-08
Packaged: 2017-10-15 10:14:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/159795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/basaltgrrl/pseuds/basaltgrrl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They both have their nightmares.  And they help each other through.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Nightmares

  
  
  
  
**Entry tags:**   
|   
[fic](http://community.livejournal.com/lifein1973/tag/fic), [fic type: slash](http://community.livejournal.com/lifein1973/tag/fic%20type%3A%20slash), [genre: episode related](http://community.livejournal.com/lifein1973/tag/genre%3A%20episode%20related), [pairing: sam/gene](http://community.livejournal.com/lifein1973/tag/pairing%3A%20sam%2Fgene), [rating: blue cortina](http://community.livejournal.com/lifein1973/tag/rating%3A%20blue%20cortina)  
  
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**Fic: Five Nightmares, Blue Cortina**   
_   


Title: Five Nightmares  
Word Count: 1696  
Pairing: Sam/Gene  
Rating: Blue Cortina  
Summary: They both have their nightmares.  And they help each other through.  
   
Oops!  Forgot to mention that this was betaed by the superb and mighty Fawsley!

 

I was lost in that kind of floaty sleep that comes early in the morning, the kind when you know you’re sleeping, you can almost feel the bed, but it’s softer than any bed has a right to be.   It only seems to come after you’ve been up half the night tossing and turning, and have finally drifted off.  And there was this scream.  Cut right through me, electric shock, like, and I was awake in an instant, and yelling.

“Arrgh!  Jesus!  What!”

And then I knew what, and where, and who with, and that Sam was on the floor and I was in his bed ( _his bed_ ).  He looked lost and knackered despite the morning sunlight.

“It was a dream.  Just had a dream,” he muttered, hand to his face.

“What I call a dream involves Diana Dors and a bottle of chip oil!” I blustered, just making noise.  Covering up the weirdness, the awareness.  The feel of his sheets under my hands.  The fucking smell of him in the bed, and what that made me feel like.  The knowledge that I had fallen asleep in the spot where he had lain.  “Oh no, that's what you call a guilty conscience, my friend,” I accused.

“What?” he asked, seeming not to be listening.

“The root of nightmares.”

“My conscience is clear, thank you very much.”

“Whereas me, slept like a baby,” I lied.  I flopped back with a groan.

“Yeah, a twenty-stone baby.  Burps, snores, farts…”

“I do not snore.”

 

-#-

 

I was awake before he was, that night.  Just staring at the ceiling, thinking about how much had changed, and how much was still the same.  I loved having someone in the bed with me, again.  Loved it more, truth be told, than I had ever loved having Vera there, with her nightgown carefully done up.  Every night she buttoned those buttons; in the early days I couldn’t wait to get to undoing them.  But over the years I began to see how hard that was for her, how little she enjoyed it.

But Sam was different.  Sam slept naked with no hesitation.  Sam never had any hesitation; he made the first move more often than not.  Couldn’t tell him how much that turned me on, but I think he knew.

“Mum!” he screamed, and he was bolt upright next to me, panting in the darkness.  “Where…?” he gasped, and then he was fumbling around, more and more desperate until I reached over and turned on the bedside light.  He looked at me for a moment with no recognition, just a wild, scared look in his eyes.  “Where’s my…” and a long pause as he stared.  “Gene.”

“Your DCI.  It’s 1974.  Just a coupla hours until breakfast time.”

“Oh.”

He was still in a dream, I could tell.  He was still breathing hard, still looking lost.  “You had a nightmare,” I told him.  “Go back to sleep.”

“Oh,” he said again, and he was shivering, pulling his knees up to his chest and hugging them.  “Am I… really here?”

“Yes.  Here.  In my bed, in my house.  You’re here.   Where else would you be?”

He looked at me with shadowed eyes.  “Hospital,” he said at last.  “My… my mum is at my bedside.”

“A _dream_ ,”  I told him.  He flopped back, hands to his face, and I thought about how much had not changed, since the day Sam arrived in CID.

 

-#-

 

The telly was still droning, but the game had been over for at least twenty minutes.  I blinked, rubbed my eyes, and admitted to myself that I had dozed off.  As had Sam; he was lying sprawled, his head limp against the back of the sofa, his hands like abandoned toys this way and that.  I repressed a desire to lean over and kiss his open mouth, his neck. 

“No!”  Sam jerked to a sitting position, eyes staring wildly, and then eased forward until his face was buried in his hands.  He remained like that for moments as I watched in concern, and then his shoulders began to shake.

“Sam!”  I scooted over to put an arm around him.  “What was it?  Nightmare?”

Sam lifted his head, still shaking, and I realized that his face was contorted with laughter.  It began to come out of him in hiccoughs, the kind of laughter that barely allows a breath of air.  He was laughing so hard he was crying.

“What the bloody hell is wrong with you now?”

“D-d-dream,” Sam gasped.

“What, they were tickling you in your nightmares?”

“Oh god!  I – I was a lion, see, and I was fucking a gazelle,” Sam choked out.

“Bloody hell, Tyler!”

“And I was going at it hammer and tongs, and wondering what kind of babies we were going to have and whether I would—“ he choked off, giggling.  “I—whether I would _eat_ her when we were done…”

I snorted.  Rubbed Sam’s corded back, tried not to encourage him.

“And then,” he continued, “she turned her head and asked me… if I was using protection.  And suddenly she was speaking in your voice.  And I said—“ he gave a little gasp of laughter.  “I said, ‘Hell no, honey.  I’m fucking you up the arse!’”

I laughed then.  Couldn’t help it.  He put his face back in his hands.  He was still shaking.  When he lifted his face up again there was something new in his expression – something pained.

“But, Gene,” he gasped.  “It makes me feel so strange… what if… somewhere, I am a lion.  What if that was real.  What if—“

“Sam Tyler!”  I slapped him, gently.  “Snap out of it.  Were a nightmare, and now you’re here.  Awake.  Let’s go to bed proper.”

 

-#-

 

“No!”  There was a yell, and I was just awake enough to know it was Sam.  The usual; he was panting and sweating and scrabbling in the bedclothes.  The room was dark,  with blades of light from the window, too stuffy and rank with his sweaty fear.

“I’m here,” I said sleepily, putting an arm across him.  “Sam, I’m here.”

“Gene…?”  He sounded lost.

“I’m here.”

“Hold me.”  He lay back down, wriggled into my arms, still shaking and breathing hard.  I held him tight, like I knew he wanted and waited for the inevitable.

“I… was somewhere.  It was dark.  I could hear voices but I couldn’t see anything.  I realized after a while that I couldn’t move, that I was covered up and I couldn’t move a finger.  I was…”  He shook, in short bursts, trying to calm himself.  “I was so scared, Gene.  It was… like… being dead.”

I kissed the back of his neck, held him close, rubbed a hand up and down his arm.  “You are alive, Sam.  You’re alive and you’re here.”  He was, he was warm and in my bed – our bed, and I would make him believe in it.  No matter how many times he woke up with those particular images in his head.  I rocked my hips against him, felt him slowly loosening up, relaxing into the now.

I rubbed my face against the back of his head, his hair, smelling him, feeling him too warm and sweaty and yet right, and I was starting to get hard and hoping he would respond to that.  I was hoping, because it seemed to clear his head, to bring him back to Manchester.  To anchor him in the here and now.  To make him mine.

My Sam.  I rubbed his back, his shoulders, then ran my hand down to his arse and stroked it.

“No,” he muttered, and twisted around to face me, to open his lips to me and take charge.  Later, buried balls-deep inside him as we rocked and thrust in the darkness, he groaned and swore, and at some point stammered, “It’s real.  Fuck, it’s real, Gene.  God!”

 

-#-

 

“Sam!”  I thrashed wildly against the blankets, and then realized what they were and went limp with… relief?  I was in my own bed.  I was sweaty, rapidly chilling.  I was alone.

The fear from the nightmare struck right through me like a hot iron.  I sat up, scrabbled through the bedclothes.  He wasn’t here.  I turned on the bedside lamp.  He wasn’t here.  His book wasn't on his table.  His clothes were not folded over the chair.  His side of the bed was messed, but that was my doing.

My breathing had started to take strange turns.  I felt like I was fighting to push air out of my lungs.  I swung my legs over the edge of the bed and sat there, striving for control, feeling my heart going mad in my chest as I struggled for air, air, air.

He wasn’t here.  At last I drew a clear, if shaky, breath, and stood up, pulled on a pair of trousers and walked down the hall to the bathroom.  I splashed water on my face, toweled it off, and stared into my own eyes in the mirror.  “Sam,” I whispered to my reflection, and my face crumpled with grief.

I left the bathroom, stumbling in the sudden darkness, and noticed that there was a light on downstairs.  I went down the staircase, into the kitchen.

He was there.  At the table, mug of tea to hand, and a plate of biscuits, book open on the table.  He looked up, all tired eyes and messed hair, shirt half-buttoned, but real and in my kitchen and waiting for me to say something.  I was silent for a moment too long.

“Gene?  Are you OK?”

“Had a nightmare.”

“Oh.”  He stood and held out his arms.  I stepped into them. 

“You’re still here,” I whispered.

“Where else would I be?”

“Dunno.”  He was here, skinny and unyielding and in my house, and I wasn’t alone at night.  That’s what mattered.  The nightmare was just that – a phantom of sleep, not my reality.  And not his reality, either.  I pressed my face to his shoulder and breathed him, the realness of him, the here-ness of him.

Later we convinced each other of our existence, all over again.

 

 


End file.
